Jellyfish inspired robots

By connecting a magnetic composite elastomer core to eight bendable lappets, researchers created an untethered jellyfish-inspired soft millirobot. The lappets contract and recover like a swimming jellyfish when exposed to an oscillating magnetic field along the robot’s body central axis.The robots can perform various tasks and could be used to better understand jellyfish locomotion. Credit: Multi-functional soft-bodied jellyfish-like swimming Ziyu Ren, Wenqi Hu, Xiaoguang Dong & Metin Sitti Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10549-7